I remember how books got me going after I finally grasped Braille. Hungry for words, and her teacher’s scribbling on her hand would never be as fast, she thought, as the people who could read the
![the miracle worker helen keller the miracle worker helen keller](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Anne_Bancroft_Patty_Duke_Miracle_Worker_2_1960.jpg)
She wrote about how she was frustrated by the alphabet, by the language of the deaf, even with the speed with which her teacher spelled things out for her on her palm. Here I am not disenfranchised."īut how she struggled to master language. She proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf. That’s part of the first great achievement of Helen Keller. Were related to things! It’s like the lyrics of that song: "On a clear day, rise and look around you, and you’ll see who you are." Helen hadīut, oh, the transformation that came over her when she discovered that words All rage is anger that is acted in, bottled in for so long that it just pops out. I was sent to a state school for theīlind, but I flunked first grade because Braille just didn’t make any sense to me. Have since learned to be extremely cautious about. The practice at the time was to pump a large amount of oxygen into the incubator, something doctors This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted." She was a wild child. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically "Sometimes," she later wrote, "I stood between two persons who As she grew up, she managed to learn to do tinyĮrrands, but she also realized that she was missing something. But she was blinded and, very soon after, deaf. It struck dramatically and left her unconscious. Helen Keller was less than two years old when she came down withĪ fever. She altered our perception of the disabled and remapped the boundaries of sight and sense. Written by Diane Schuur with David Jackson, TIME 100: